


the creation of fire

by starrydreams



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Amnesty, Angst, Backstory, Character Death, TAZ Amnesty, hot sylph ladies, little baby aubrey...., my hot take, theory stuff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-20
Updated: 2019-03-20
Packaged: 2019-11-26 10:51:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18179642
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starrydreams/pseuds/starrydreams
Summary: And we see Aubrey’s dad in the living room of his new home. He’s sitting on the couch head in his hands as he grieves of the loss of his wife. Today is the two year anniversary of her death and it still feels like it’s only the day after, the memory of the night replaying over and over in his head almost to torture him. He had spent every day of the previous year trying to move on from the thoughts, to not let them deter him from just simply living, but, just for today, he grew tired of running away from them. Just for today, he sat down and let them consume him whole.But the thoughts didn’t just start the night of the fire, they started from the beginning.





	the creation of fire

**Author's Note:**

> HELLO EVERYONE! this is my piece for the amnesty mini bang! this is my theory on the backstory and the pendant and stuff so i hope you like it! i didnt beta this hard so pls dont be mean  
> this is the wonderful art done for my fic!! https://beetle-bug-art.tumblr.com/post/183591837100/the-art-i-was-doing-for-the-linked-fic-as-part-of

     And we see Aubrey’s dad in the living room of his new home. He’s sitting on the couch head in his hands as he grieves of the loss of his wife. Today is the two year anniversary of her death and it still feels like it’s only the day after, the memory of the night replaying over and over in his head almost to torture him. He had spent every day of the previous year trying to move on from the thoughts, to not let them deter him from just simply living, but, just for today, he grew tired of running away from them. Just for today, he sat down and let them consume him whole.

     But the thoughts didn’t just start the night of the fire, they started from the beginning.

\-------------------

     He had met her in high school, one of the most cliche things that could happen. Though, she was in one of his classes and, when he missed due to being sick, she would always help him with the work he had to catch up on. She had the be the prettiest girl in school, too, she _had_ to be. Other boys would elect the cheer caption as the owner of that title, but he always disagreed with them. They teased him, saying that he had a crush, and he could never deny those claims. Before he knew it, he had fallen for her.

     They started to date sometime during their senior year and he considered himself one of the luckiest guys alive. Every second that they weren’t at school or busy they spent together, just talking and laughing as if they had been together since the dawn of time. It was easy to be with her, and she said she had found it easy to be with him. Her friends cooed that they wished they had boyfriends like him, and it always made him speechless. He didn’t think he was doing anything special.

     They stayed together well into their college years, having gone to the same one. Nothing could separate them, not even hectic exam studying schedules. By the time they were out of college, they were both sure they were ready to move to the next step together.

     Though, apparently, they had different ideas of what the next step was.

     “I need to tell you something,” she had said with a little bit of a worried expression, barely penetrating her usual confident and calm one.

     “What is it?” He asked, concern falling on his own face.

     She worried her bottom lip, a hand going to rest on top of the bracelet she always wore. He never thought much about that bracelet, if he was being honest. She thought it was just an accessory she always wore, something given to her by her mother. She never took it off, not even in the more intimate moments or when she took a shower, at least, he thought. Some people had pieces of jewelry like that, and who was he to judge?

     “I need you to promise me you won’t freak out.”

     He hesitated. He didn’t like that. “I promise.”

     And she took off the bracelet. At first, his eyes didn’t stray from her wrist, shocked that she had removed it from her person. He thought it was practically glued to her. Though, when he shifted his gaze to look up at her, his heart stopped and his jaw would’ve dropped if he didn’t have a shred of dignity.

     Her eyes usually had a fiery determination in them, but he was pretty sure that they had _actual_ fire in them now. They shone reds, oranges, yellows, constantly shifting as if he was looking right into a fireplace. She seemed to glow, just faintly, and seemed to feel a little warmer than she usually did, though he was unable to tell since he wasn’t touching her. Her ears pointed just slightly, barely noticeable if he hadn’t been paying attention to every detail of her character now.

     “What-?” He asked, startled and shocked eyes wide.

     Putting the bracelet back on, her features returned to normal. “Let me tell you about a place named Sylvain.”

     Suddenly the ring felt all too heavy in his pocket.

     As it turned out, her great grandmother was a… Sylph, from this place called Sylvain. She had been exiled from her homeland and sent to Earth where she fell in love with a human there. He wasn’t sure he completely believed the story she had told him that day when he meant to propose to her-- no, he definitely didn’t believe it at first. There was no way that there was another planet connected to theirs with some portal somewhere that _moved_. That sort of thing only happened in movies; there were no creatures, there were no monsters. That’s just not how the real world worked. She had to have used some sort of special effects to trick him when she took off the bracelet.

     It wasn’t until she showed him the Flamebright Pendant that her mother had given her as some sort of sylph family tradition and conjured a fireball in her hand. He had felt like he could faint at the sight of it like he was staring straight into the shattering of his entire universe. It took him _days_ to process it, and sometimes he lied awake at night just thinking about the people who might be Sylphs that he went to high school or college with, just right under his nose, without him knowing.

     He still proposed to her once he was able to wrap his brain around all of the information she had given him. He tried to simply ignore it rather than call attention to it, hoping that it would stop making his head hurt when he woke up from dreams about his partner shooting fireballs out of her hand and that everything would just go back to normal. And, for the most part, everything _did_ go back to normal, and it wasn’t talked about between them very often-- maybe offhand comments here and there, but even that was rare. Everything that she told him about Sylvain and the Sylphs was able to fade into soft background noise, easy to ignore to focus on bigger things like their wedding and the house they were going to move into.

     It wasn’t for a few years into their marriage that they would delicately bring the Sylph topic up again, not until the whisper of having kids was brought up between the two of them. It was late one night, the two lying on their backs, side by side, with their fingers intertwined. She was the one to bring it up first, and it had caught him a little off guard.

     “Would you want to have kids?” She had asked, turning her head to look at him.

     He opened his mouth to say yes, that he would love to but remembering what his wife was made him hesitate. “Would they need to disguise themselves?”

     She pressed her lips together. “I doubt it. I barely have any traits from my great grandmother left, the bracelet is just… a precaution. I’m sure she wouldn’t need a charm to disguise herself since the sylph bloodline has been so watered down.”

     “Would she be able to do…” He trailed off, hating to say it. “Magic?”

     “Most likely, but she might need the Flamebright pendant to help her be able to fully realize her power.” At his wary look, she rolled her eyes. “It’ll be fine, honey, I can make sure they don’t set the house on fire.”

     The birth was carried out in the best hospital their city had to offer, despite minor protests from him. He worried that, if their baby looked more nonhuman than most babies, that the doctors might say something or try to do emergency surgery for her. ( _Her._ They were going to have a girl. They had both been overjoyed to hear that.) Worse, they might think their baby was some sort of monster and try to hurt her. His wife had reassured him that it would be _fine_ to have the delivery in the hospital, that there was no way their baby would look more monstrous than she looked herself, and that their little daughter would be fine; she had a charm prepared just in case, ready to slip it over her little head.

     Everything went as smooth as giving birth to a child could go, and by the end of it all, his wife was holding their daughter in her arms as they cooed over her. She had been right, there was nothing seemingly out of the ordinary with their daughter. She looked human to him, though, he could’ve sworn that, for just a second, he saw a flash of something in her eyes that reminded him of his wife when she first took the bracelet off around him. The sight of it made him frown and squint to see if he saw that flash again.

     He waited a count, but with no signs of abnormality, a smile spread across his face again as he wrapped an arm around his wife. She smiled up at him before looking back down at their darling little girl and wrapping the blanket a little tighter around her.

“Welcome to the world, Aubrey,” she whispered.

\---------

     “Are you sure this is okay?” He worriedly asked his wife, shooting glances to their daughter, now nine, who was practicing stage magic in the living room with the kit they had bought her. In the back of his mind he knew that the stage magic was harmless, that pulling rings apart or guessing the card that you had picked from reading the back of them wouldn’t cause any major problems, but he didn’t _know_ what could happen, either. He had been told that she would probably have magic, that she would be able to do it, and this was too close for him to be comfortable with it.

     “Honestly, honey, it’s fine. Pulling a stuffed rabbit out of a hat isn’t going to cause fire to come out of her hands.” She sighed, fixing him with a look that only wives could give their annoying husbands.

     “But what if it triggers something inside her,” he countered, beginning to help her put away the groceries they bought. “And she realizes she can to actual magic if she just tries to figure out how to."

     “Then we can cross that bridge when we get to it.” She smiled softly and placed a hand gently on top of his. “But, I assure you, I don’t believe it works like that. Since she’s not pure Sylph, she’ll need the pendant’s help to access that power, and you know that it’s safely tucked away in our room. She’ll get it when she’s ready.”

     He nodded and leaned down to kiss her, though her words did little to reassure her. He would still send nervous glances to the living room where Aubrey played with the cards, trying to figure out how to get ahold of them correctly. Part of him wanted to go over to her and show her how to, after all the card games he had played with friends in college, but the other part strayed away, wanted to stay in the kitchen where it was safe from any possible fireballs his daughter could accidentally shoot out.

     He frowned and told his wife that he would start making dinner preparations tonight instead of her.

     His anxiety and worry grew and hardened the more that Aubrey got into magic over the years. The first “show” she had put on for them when she was ten had him sitting up straight, almost rigid, partially afraid about how it would go. He let out a breath of relief as soon as it was over to find that she hadn’t set anything on fire, and he tried to cling to the hope that this interest in magic was just a fixation that kids had, that she would forget about it later, but this hope would soon wither and die as he realized that there was no chance Aubrey was going to let go of her dream of becoming a magician.

     Everything else about her he could accept. She wanted to dye her hair, cut it in weird ways, dress in a less than favorable manner, hell, even kiss girls. All of that was _fine_ to him, while he wasn’t too happy about it, none of it was harmful, none of it affected him outside the weird looks the other members of his hoity-toity clubs would give him for allowing his daughter to dress in such a way. Those looks he could always shrug off and pat himself on the back for letting his daughter be who she was.

     But _was_ he? He put down her talents with stage magic because he was scared of the not-so-human part of her coming out and the troubles that would go along with that. What if her Sylph appearance showed up late? What if her powers manifested in the middle of a show and she burned the venue down? Even worse, what if she was practicing at home and caught something on fire there, hurt herself, or them? His wife said she would teach her how to use her magic, sure, and that she needed the pendant, but what if she wasn’t there for when it came about? What if she didn’t need the pendant?

     That was something he couldn’t afford to let happen. He was protecting her, and them, and everyone else that could suffer at the hand of cruel fire. He wasn’t going to force her to drop her whole magician act, but he wouldn’t stop trying to persuade her to, wouldn’t stop asking if she was sure that this was something she wanted to do. Even if her magic wasn’t a problem, what would happen if she didn’t become a famous magician as she hoped? What would she do then? He didn’t want to see her dreams crushed by horrible disappointment and failure. He just needed her to really rethink it, was all.

     The night came for her to leave and he knew he was running out of time to try to convince her to stay home instead of going out. He brought it up, and he could tell that it upset her, but he didn’t want her to risk everything just for a gig that may or may not stick. He wanted her to know that he could come home if she never ended up “making it” and becoming as good as the people she idolized, that he wanted her safe if she didn’t. He wanted to bring up all the things he couldn’t, about Sylvain and her mother and magic, but he and his wife had sworn that they wouldn’t tell her about that until she was ready for the pendant and that she would do all the explaining instead of him.

     He practically paced while his wife talked to Aubrey about whatever they usually got up to talk about, trying to figure out ways to tell her that she had to stay, hoping his wife was telling her about Sylvain so he could use it as a reason, but fearing that she was being shown the pendant at the same time. He had half a mind to go join their conversation, be present for that sort of thing like they had planned, but did he really want to be there when Aubrey realized she had magic? He wasn’t sure.

     Though, he would never get the chance to, with the robbery and the fire.

     He knew the fire had to be Aubrey, it _had_ to be. He knew his wife wouldn't be so careless with her magic, even though she rarely used it around him, he trusted that she was as skilled as she promised she was. Aubrey, after being shown the pendant, was inexperienced didn’t know what she was doing. Maybe she did it accidentally, maybe she tried to do something on purpose, but either way, he didn’t care. He didn’t try to bring it up to her before or after the funeral.

     He didn’t try to stop her from leaving anymore, either. He knew that he was never going to be able to convince her not to leave, and now that the one person who could teach her how to use her magic properly was gone, he wasn’t sure he wanted to be around such a ticking time bomb. He didn’t want to wait for her to burn down their next house or even kill him. So he let her go without complaint, without trying to convince her otherwise, which he knew surprised her, but he couldn’t bring himself to care.

     He let her go with unease in his stomach, watching her leave as he waved. He felt like he was going on autopilot, doing what his wife would want him to do. He knew that she would want to see Aubrey depart, that she would want him to see it, so he went and hugged her goodbye and made sure she had everything for her trip. He stood there for a while, too, after she left, staring at the spot of where he was.

     Later he would go back to the hotel room he was staying at while he waited for the police to carry out the case and for everything to settle. Later he would move into one of the other homes they had, away from the city, and its vastness would make him feel empty and hollow without a wife and a daughter to share it with. He would sit at the breakfast table and forced himself to eat the food the cooks made for him as he replayed the scene from that night in his head over and over again.

     Later he would come to terms with what happened and call his daughter, ask if she was alright and how she was doing, and not blame her for the death of his wife, but right now, he would sit on the couch with his fists balled in his greying hair and let tears fall from his eyes, squeezed shut, wondering how his life would be if his wife had never told him about her heritage, or if he had never met her at all. (He would immediately regret this, and curse himself for ever thinking that-- for thinking of his wife that way.)

     And after everything, after his tears and his grieving, he would stand and blow out the candle he had lit for his wife.

**Author's Note:**

> if you liked, please leave a kudos/comment ;0!


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